Dinah, ClinkShrink, & Roy produce Shrink Rap: a blog by Psychiatrists for Psychiatrists, interested bystanders are also welcome. A place to talk; no one has to listen.

Monday, March 09, 2009

CBT4CBT

I heard a talk today on CBT4CBT: Computer Based Training for Cognitive Behavior Therapy where substance abuse treatment is supplemented with On-line real-time psychotherapy groups. I hope I'm saying this right.

The patients go to regular appointments, but in addition, there is an on-line group. The patients and a therapist all 'meet' at a pre-arranged time. There is a camera on the therapist, so his image pops up in the corner of the screen. He can write on the main part of the screen. The participants call in over their computers (each is given a microphone). They're aren't seen, but they have screen names, and they talk one at a time: they press a button to speak and release it when they are done, assuring that people don't talk over one another (I could use one of these buttons in real life). All the patients liked it and they did as well as the controls who had real-life treatment without the supplemental on-line group.

2 comments:

Mr Ian
said...

Internet counselling is something I've been keen to see develop. I've seen various versions of varying quality.Mostly they're scary amateurish things that are more concerned about developing the 'process' than providing quality interventions; tho this sounds quite 'safe'.

However...Carroll and colleagues randomly assigned 77 outpatients who met dependence criteria and who had used drugs or alcohol in the last month to receive the standard treatment of weekly individual and group sessions of general drug counseling or the standard treatment plus access to the computerized CBT4CBT program

Is that saying people who got more than the standard support did better?Or is that standard treatment +/- group-vs-CBT4CBT?

Anyhow... more oddly...

"This is a very small sample," says Carroll, explaining that many patients weren't eligible for the fMRI study because they had metal objects in their bodies.Have they stumbled on some correlation between drug addiction and metal objects in the body??

they excluded participants with metal objects simply because they were using fMRI. the functional magnetic resonance imaging would interfere and confound, and more importantly, cause dangerous or even fatal harm to the participant.